Automobile safety consistently remains a cause for concern amongst automobile manufacturers and consumers. Although modern cars contain numerous advances designed to increase occupant safety, the driver's actions are often the ultimate arbiter of whether a car accident results in injury to the occupants. In order to address this issue, manufacturers have recently begun to include accident prevention systems in their car designs in an attempt to mitigate driver error and prevent the occurrence of accidents, rather than relying on post-accident safety measures. Accident prevention systems range in functionality from merely warning drivers of an imminent accident, to taking control of the vehicle to actively prevent or mitigate the accident.
Accident prevention systems, however, have inherent problems which have prevented their widespread adoption. Accident prevention systems by nature interfere with the driver's control of a car. As such, the driver's interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the vehicle is replaced or altered by the car's own interpretation of the same events. Existing accident prevention systems, however, have access to far less information than a competent driver. As a result, existing accident prevention systems are prone to providing warnings of accidents that a driver knows will not occur.
More frequently, the lack of information about the car's circumstances causes an accident prevention system to provide a warning of a dangerous driving situation of which the driver is already aware. Existing accident prevention systems have no way of knowing what the driver knows about the car's circumstances. In many cases, a driver does not need to be warned about a possibly dangerous driving situation they have already recognized may occur. As a result, existing accident prevention systems provide more warnings than are necessary, and thus are annoying to drivers. As a result, many car owners with such systems may ignore or disable entirely the accident prevention systems, thereby nullifying their effectiveness.